This Week's Sermon: "Zechariah Redeemed"

68 “Bless the Lord God of Israel
    because he has come to help and has delivered his people.
69 He has raised up a mighty savior for us in his servant David’s house,
70     just as he said through the mouths of his holy prophets long ago.
71 He has brought salvation from our enemies
    and from the power of all those who hate us.
72 He has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
    and remembered his holy covenant,
73         the solemn pledge he made to our ancestor Abraham.
He has granted 74 that we would be rescued
        from the power of our enemies
    so that we could serve him without fear,
75         in holiness and righteousness in God’s eyes,
            for as long as we live.
76 You, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High,
    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.
77 You will tell his people how to be saved
    through the forgiveness of their sins.
78 Because of our God’s deep compassion,
    the dawn from heaven will break upon us,
79     to give light to those who are sitting in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
        to guide us on the path of peace.”

“The Other Holy Couple: An Advent with Elizabeth and Zechariah,” Week Four

Last week, I began my message to you by sharing in brief the story of my daughter’s namesake, my great-grandmother Satenig, who along with her brother Harry Toumajan successfully escaped the Armenian Genocide after their mother, my great-grandmother Altoon, died in 1916.

I knew part of Satenig’s story from childhood; my family handed down to me. But some facts I had misremembered, and I was unaware of others. Meanwhile, I had no inkling as to her brother Harry’s trials until I learned from my cousin Hagop that Harry had put his ordeal to paper in a memoir, a copy of which I managed to find online and have shipped to me back when we lived in Vancouver.

Harry and Satenig had fled to the United States separately—she by way of the Pacific Ocean, from Vladivostok to Yokohama to Seattle, and he by way of Russia to Oslo to New York. I knew nothing of this latter exodus by my great-great-uncle, and he took pains in his writing to express his gratitude for the people who had successfully sheltered him and smuggled him away. He writes, in part:

I (want to) express my sincere appreciation for such a man as Mehmed Aga, and for many others of the (Muslim) faith, because I am convinced that, were it not for them, I would not be alive today…I am just as strongly convinced, and know it to be true, that many others of my race under the same circumstances as mine would also not be alive today were it not for the fact that some sympathetic, understanding Turk with a golden heart at some time or another, perhaps for a few moments, a few hours, or a few days, extended a warm, friendly hand, giving food, shelter, and comfort to an otherwise doomed person.

Redemption is a powerful thing—we all love a good redemption story, of an antagonist turning themselves into a hero. But what if redemption is simply us becoming our best selves? That while some among us are capable of truly profound evil, maybe the rest of us are not cartoon villains to begin with, and so for us to be redeemed means becoming the very best versions of ourselves? That even when others show their worst selves, otherwise ordinary folk can still show their best selves. This is what I see in Zechariah—always a faithful and devoted man, impossible to fit with a black hat, but now, finally, after the birth of his son, he is his very best self.

This has been a sermon series for the church season of Advent, or, in much of popular American culture, the “Christmas season.” But the Christmas season does not traditionally begin until Christmas Day. The four weeks leading up to Christmas are set aside in the church calendar to be a time of preparing the way for the Lord, and in that spirit, the origin story of John the Baptist, who preached that message of preparing the way for the Lord, seems an appropriate sermon series for now. So, for this Advent, we have walked alongside the other Holy Couple of Luke’s Gospel—not Mary and Joseph (though we will of course be at their side on Christmas Eve), but Mary’s relative Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah. They end up overshadowed by Mary and Joseph’s dramatic saga in the end, but there is much in Luke’s telling of their story to capture and hold our attention as well.

We have spent three weeks now hearing the saga of Elizabeth and Zechariah in the birth of their son John, and that saga culminates in Zechariah’s prophetic song, which concludes Luke 1. It also has a vivid parallel in Luke 1—the Magnificat of Mary. And the resemblance is hardly coincidental!

If you take those two songs—Mary’s and Zechariah’s—and read them side-by-side, the similarities practically jump out at you, shouting to be seen and heard. But we can start here: the reversal of fortune for those who believe, but are suffering, who have faith but live amid insecurity and trepidation. In the Magnificat, God looks with favor upon the humbleness of God’s servant Mary, and God pulls down the powerful from their thrones while lifting up the lowly like Mary. In Zechariah’s song, God rescues the oppressed from their enemies and delivers God’s people from the power of any and all who would hate them. These reversals of circumstance are a direct result of God’s steadfastness and faithfulness.

What Zechariah adds on is the last part—where he sings directly to his son. God is still being praised, but now John is being addressed directly, and I have to say that I hear Zechariah’s voice differently, more deeply and profoundly, now as a parent than I did previously. I have learned firsthand just how meaningful it is to say aloud your most passionate hopes for your child.

In Zechariah’s doing so, I think we should see God doing so—God singing of God’s greatest hopes for each of us—and that, to me, marks the truth of Zechariah’s redemption and restoration in God’s sight. He is no longer unsure or uncertain, but is instead singing to his son in boldness and in truth.

Zechariah has been well and truly redeemed. Not because he was ever a bad man or any sort of antagonist, because he was not, but because he ever-so-briefly lost his way and had to regain it. There is redemption in that, too, and while that may strike us as slightly smaller than the dramatic from villain-to-hero transformations we are used to in movies and novels, this is the parent of the cousin of the Messiah, the one true Son of God, and the salvation this represents should be plenty dramatic.

I hope that we can see in Zechariah someone for us to aspire to—not in that we would ever parent the herald of the Son of God, no, but that we might be people capable of goodness who need to rely on God to become even better. We rightly honor the extraordinary people who change the world, like Elizabeth and Zechariah, but even if we do not fashion ourselves as extraordinary, we can still change someone’s world for the better. We can choose to let God refine us and perfect us, and I think that, too, can be a part of being born again, or being born anew. We need not have been a cartoon villain, or even a particularly unpleasant person, for us to be dramatically redeemed—Zechariah is proof of that.

I think that is what I value in the story I learned from my late uncle Harry about men like Mehmed Aga. You do not have to be some sort of Olympian demigod to change the world, you can be a good person because you follow a good God. Elizabeth and Zechariah do—their faith in God is integral to their goodness. We can no sooner separate that out of them than we can separate thunder from lightning, or rainbows from rainstorms. They simply come with.

Our faith has to do likewise for us—be so integral to our goodness that we cannot separate the two. Faith has not always done that for Christians across history, but for us, it absolutely needs to. It must. Our faith in God is fully capable of redeeming us because God has always been capable of redeeming us. But it is up to each of us choose that redemption. We have to choose for our faith to result in the outward sort of goodness that Elizabeth and Zechariah exhibit, and which Zechariah sings of here as his hope for his son.

That faith, especially faith in our children, is faith in their good works that we may not be around to see. Of the four parents of Luke 1, only Mary do we know for certain is still alive when John the Baptist and Jesus are both executed. It could well be that for Elizabeth and Zechariah especially, for we already know they are elderly, that part of their faith is in believing that John will live up to every word of this promise when they know they are unlikely to be around to see his ministry come to fruition. They were there at the beginning, possibly knowing that they would likely not be there at the end, yet they chose to let themselves be led by God anyways.

This is the lesson for us as the church—we continue in its kingdom-building ways, knowing that we are likely not to see its ultimate fruition in the generations that come after us, out of nothing but our faith that there will indeed be those fruits decades or even centuries from now. And in this work, we are invited to take part in a leap of faith that mirrors ever-so-slightly that of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s. So in Zechariah’s redemption, we can indeed, and should, see our own redemption, for whatever our station, whatever we may have done or left undone, it is through God that our own redemption can be found and accomplished. Our redemption is God-sized, not us-sized, and so is done across the ages and not merely in our own little lifetimes.

We have covered a lot of ground these four weeks with John the Baptist’s parents. We have gone with them from bewilderment and doubt to childbirth and naming to praising and redemption. We have journeyed far with them because they have journeyed far and arrived in a place of celebration and rejoicing. We will arrive there too, in a few short days’ time, when Christ is born, God is revealed and made flesh, and nothing will ever be the same again.

And that will be, as Zechariah sings, because of our God’s deep compassion, the dawn from heaven will break upon us, to guide us on the path of peace, of salvation, of redemption, because of the mercy that God shows, and will soon incarnate.

We are just days away now on that path, beloveds. We are almost there. Do not lose faith. For by that faith, we will make it to Christmas once more.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

December 20, 2020